“I have not lost my mind — it's backed up in the cloud somewhere (part of it right here)!”

Wednesday Web Roundup, 2015-01-28

A daily roundup of significant articles I read on the web, updated throughout the day.

Never Again? Shut Up! — Commentary by Wade Fransson on why we still need Holocaust Remembrance Day. He quotes something Ben Kingsley heard when filming Simon Wiesenthal’s story: “You Jews – it never happened, and if you don’t shut up it will happen again.”

Public Chastity, Private Chaos — Mark Regnerus. associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses the discrepancy between loudly proclaimed beliefs about sexuality and expected standards of behaviour in public.

E-Book Momentum Slowing Down — Mark Bauerlein of First Things reports on a Scholastic poll which has students expressing a preference for printed, paper books over eBooks. Personally, I am of two minds: I like printed books, but I also like the convenience of having several books with me in the size and with the weight of a single paperback, and with my place in each book kept automatically.

did not originate with the Nazis. It began with polite, urbane, well-educated, sophisticated people who saw “social hygiene” via, among other methods, euthanasia, as representing progress and modernity. They wanted to ditch the old Judaeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of all human life and replace it with what they regarded as a more advanced and rational philosophy.

July 20, 2005 marked a very significant step towards totalitarianism in Canada. Free speech, the rights of parents, the right to preach and practise one’s religion and the worn and tattered fibers of normative decency were all deeply damaged. With the legalization of same-sex “marriage” what had been aberrant only a few years earlier became entrenched as a legal right, and what had been a normal and natural view of sexuality had been reduced to the retrograde thinking of hate crime dinosaurs.

A little later in the article:

The legalization of same-sex “marriage” is not about allowing something; same-sex “marriage” was already taking place. It was not about recognizing something; spousal and survivor benefits, family tax incentives and any other advantages to marriage were being or could have been granted without calling it marriage. The legalization of same-sex “marriage” was about prohibiting a definition of heterosexual marriage as normative. It was about the state denying the right to speak one of the most obvious truths about human nature. It was about a conspiracy to enforce collective madness, cultivate psychological dependence and achieve totalitarian control.

What Not To Learn From Eastern Orthodoxy — an interesting look, from a Roman Catholic perspective, at the internecine strife and factionalism evident in Eastern Orthodoxy; dominated currently by the rivalry between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Moscow Patriarchate.

By sharing our faith we can start to change the culture around us — In the Catholic Herald, Francis Phillips describes Catholic bishops’ efforts to encourage their people to become evangelizers. He quotes from Evangelizing Catholics, a book by Scott Hahn, Presbyterian-turned-Catholic who “sets out to explain to his fellow Catholics why they must change their mentality and realise that they have a duty to share their faith.” Interesting.

“The West shies away from coming to terms with the chilling reality that jihad is an organic outflow of Mohammed’s teachings and actions, and that Islamist terror is by and large an accurate reflection of original mujahidin (jihad warrior) military history. Considering the stunning growth of Muslim populations in the West, the security challenge this presents is so unsettling that many have chosen to sweep this rather large elephant under the rug.”